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Aviation world abuzz over secret U.S. chopper used in bin Laden raid

The aviation and military blogosphere was abuzz Thursday after photographs revealed that American commandos used a secret type of stealth helicopter in their raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound

Part of a damaged helicopter is seen lying near the compound after U.S. Navy SEAL commandos killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, May 2, 2011. Bin Laden was killed in the U.S. special forces assault on the Pakistani compound, then quickly buried at sea, in a dramatic end to the long manhunt for the Al Qaeda leader who had been the guiding star of global terrorism. Picture taken May 2, 2011. (STRINGER / PAKISTAN)

By Kenneth KiddFeature Writer

Fri., May 6, 2011

The aviation and military blogosphere was abuzz Thursday after photographs revealed that American commandos used a secret type of stealth helicopter in their raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound.

The helicopter crashed into the high wall that surrounds the property, and while U.S. Navy SEALs were able to blow up most of the helicopter to keep its technology secret, part of the tail section remained draped over the wall’s exterior.

But the tail didn’t match the profile of any known American airframe, sending aviation buffs into a tizzy of speculation.

Was it an entirely new stealth helicopter developed in secrecy?

Or was it a modified version of a Sikorsky Pave Low, the heavily armoured assault helicopter featured in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2?

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The consensus answer — backed up by a retired special operations aviator — quickly centred on a souped-up version of an MH-60 Black Hawk, with a series of alterations to make it all but undetectable in the air.

Those very modifications may help explain why the helicopter crashed, since they add “several hundred pounds” to the helicopter’s weight, according to the unnamed aviator quoted by Army Times.

While a standard MH-60 Black Hawk weights as little as 11,124 pounds empty, reports suggest a stealth-modified version might weigh more than 12,000 pounds.

The tail rotor, for instance, had extra blades to make it quieter in the air, and was covered with a disc-shaped device sometimes referred to as a “hubcap.” The main rotor would also have been modified and, by the reckoning of Aviation Week, the entire helicopter would have been given a “silver loaded” paint job to avoid detection by infrared sensors.

The latter change would have been crucial had bin Laden been armed with heat-seeking, anti-aircraft missiles.

There’s also speculation that the stealth helicopters may have been outfitted with larger fuel tanks, to increase their range.

All that additional weight might have contributed to what aviators call “settling with power,” when a helicopter descends too quickly.

It is also likely that, as a further measure to evade detection by radar, the windshield was painted with a special coating, which could have interfered with the night-vision goggles pilots typically used in these kinds of operations.

But given the amount of training before the mission, it seems unlikely the pilot wouldn’t have known about the challenges caused by the additional weight and potentially reduced visibility.

The U.S. military first started its helicopter stealth program in the 1980s, with AH-6 Little Bird attack helicopters. In the 1990s, U.S. Special Operations Command reportedly began working with Lockheed-Martin and Boeing to take some of the stealth technology used on the F-117 Nighthawk attack aircraft, and apply it to MH-60 Black Hawks.

That would include making the sides of the helicopter both flatter and slanted as a way of deflecting radar signals.

The initial plan apparently involved placing the stealth helicopters with a new military unit to be based in Nevada, where its existence could be kept secret. That plan was shelved sometime in the last two years, but not before the military had taken delivery of some of the new choppers.

Regular Black Hawk crews have since been rotated through the Nevada base to train on the stealth version. Dan Goure, a former official with the U.S. defence department, suggested in one report that these stealth Black Hawks may have been used for years without the public’s knowledge.

“We probably have been running hundreds of missions with these helicopters over the last half dozen years, and the fact is, they’ve all been successful — or at least the helicopters have all come back.”

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